A digital servo controller has been developed for head positioning in magnetic disk drives. In order to achieve precise head positioning and stable fast access operation, the actuator velocity must be estimated correctly. A state space control that uses the state estimator is introduced in this paper. An access control method called SMART (Structural Vibration Minimized Acceleration Trajectory) has also been developed. By using this SMART control, the high harmonics of actuator drive are damped and thus both the residual vibration immediately after access and flying height fluctuation of the head are decreased. This paper describes the design and the experimental results of the state space controller and the SMART access control.